She didn't once call home, or contact friends, though she knew those closest to her feared the worst. She walked around freely, close to her own neighborhood, and apparently never made an effort to reach out for help. And when finally rescued, Utah teenager Elizabeth Smart did something that seems beyond comprehension: She denied her identity.

September 19, 2002 | NORAH VINCENT, Norah Vincent is a New York writer and a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a think tank set up after Sept. 11 to study terrorism. Web site: www.norahvincent.com.

Is ridiculing majority opinion the only way to show that you're a free thinker? Or can you agree with the consensus and still have a mind of your own? Take the war on terrorism. If you think we are "quagmiring" in an unwinnable, endless, metaphorical war that we are waging for the sole purpose of consolidating and wielding our power, does that make you an intellectual?

Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, the African prelate who wed a member of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church but soon repented and returned to the fold, has said that he may have been brainwashed. "Perhaps I was the object of a kind of brainwashing," the 72-year-old Milingo said in a series of interviews on his 95-day flirtation with the Moonies.

In "Method Without Madness" (July 30), your Column One about suicide bombers, you quote a number of mental health professionals, including one who claims that the suicide bombers are "psychologically as normal as you and I." You offer no differing view. As a clinical psychologist for 25 years, I view this claim as nothing short of absurd. Suicide cultists are clearly operating from a mass delusion and are very disturbed. Children dying to be close to God are brainwashed and out of their minds.

It would be fair for George W. Bush to dismiss as "bizarre" allegations that his people inserted the "rats" subliminal message in his TV ad (Sept. 13). It would be fair, if it weren't true. Unfortunately, it is true; the Bush campaign did it and got caught. The only thing "bizarre" is how Bush plays the negative campaigning game, then sloughs off accountability. No more personal character assassination commercials against Al Gore either, please, GOP. Restore a decent level of civil discourse to this election.

Out there in Nutritionville, it's dog-eat-dog. Even worse, it's man-eat-soyburger--and, shockingly, soyburger-eat-man. You've heard the news, no doubt: Researchers have found that middle-aged men who ate tofu at least twice a week were prone to shrinkage of the brain. Doesn't that figure? Just when you think you've found something you can trust, you discover it securely lodged between your shoulder blades like a cleaver in liverwurst.

Dick Corrente, now middle-aged, grew up on guns. As a child, he carried his .22-caliber pistol wherever he went. Heck, he said, everyone carried a gun in Ventura in those days. These days he's getting a little nervous. For now, the gun show at Seaside Park, where Corrente sold firearms Saturday, is safe from closure.

The 130 residents of the converted beach-side motel are mostly teenage and mostly American, but you wouldn't know it by listening: No shouts, no stereos. Just the rhythmic crash of surf. Under strict order, the youths at Casa by the Sea go about their day's routine of quiet exercise, study, chores and, when approved, group discussion. Not long ago, before their arrival, their days were spent in a dark, defiant cycle of drug abuse and other self-destructive behavior, many of the teenagers say.

Four armed guards stood between the two defendants and the throngs of Dominicans--the rich, the powerful and the merely curious--who have packed the courtroom every day for more than a week now. Each word, move and tear has been broadcast live to the nation as the horrors of the Dominican Republic's murder of the century have unfolded in a case that has riveted this Caribbean island nation.